i have just seen this. i searched the forums but no trace. this seems very nice and usefull. if only there was an evaluation version...
I just noticed it yesterday. There aren't any reviews or discussions about it, so I would assume it is new. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a webplayer, so we can't test it out.
Ehi cool! Looks very very interesting.. If someone tried it, please write a review about -_^ Btw: no "official" thread?
@Morning It worked fine with my sandybridge iMac. With Mac mini, it plays extremely slow.. so I wonder it is because the TPS character and the rendering the possibly non optimized 3d environment. But at least the UI (maybe the plugin's part) works fine even on Mac mini. I hope someone tries it... or at least it would be great having more web examples. Seeing the screenshots and documents it looks very promising though.
Nope its slow and the UI is rather unresponsive as it seems. Also going by the features I'm not sure what it does actually. It sounds like it imports the SWF and generates geometry for the movie while the logic itself still has to be done in Unity etc, potentially having the timeline transitions taken over and then has basic UI elements (I didn't see a textbox for input for example, so is there none or is this just due to the demo? Also with this performance on my MBP2011 on a Core i7 and radeon I'm unsure its gonna run fluent on mobile at all) But I've to say that their API looks rather nice and straight forward
I have played a 2d demo name zmash (http://uniswf.com/home/demo/name/zmash), and it works fine with my mac mini. It shows 50+ zombies made with flash (inferring that from their screenshots on the store) and it runs quite smoothly. The 3d TPS demo works worse than that though, so I guess it is because the scene is not optimized at all. (with 4 or more dynamic lights.)
You need Flash Professional alongside this right? If so that's $250 + $699 for a UI solution in Unity. Unless you are already a Flash developer this seems kind of silly.
I guess there are some free flash-creation apps out there. But $250 to me seems a bit steep if all it does is import and play flash, albeit somewhat slowly? Still if it works I'm sure some people will find it useful.
LoL, great argument. Really though $1000 for UI? What does it do that is so special to justify that cost? You can get NGUI off the asset store for $45 that works just fine.
I don't see what you're trying to say. If you can get NGUI for $45 then go ahead, what's the problem?
I'm asking why is this product worth spending $950 on (if you don't already have flash pro) for UI when there are much, much cheaper alternatives. What makes it that much better? To each his own I don't care what people spend their money on I'm just curious what is so special about it to justify the high cost?
Compare Scaleform with this. Scaleform for unity will be likely much more expensive than this because it is for AAA. If uniswf works as promised, I am so sure that it could be just much better than Scaleform because scaleform runs separately. (using hooking or so: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wpfafJcEOhQ)
It's all about time. As someone who regularly works with outsourced art for UI stuff, there are significantly more talented, inexpensive artists out there with flash experience than with Unity experience. My time, as a programmer, also needs to be taken into consideration when it comes to the overall cost of a product. Currently my workflow is an artist creates the UI elements, cuts them up into PNG's, and I rebuild them in Unity in whatever 2D engine I'm working out of currently. If I could cut down the time I have to spend rebuilding GUI's in Unity and increase the comfort level of the artists I work with - that's an enormous, cost saving win-win. It could easily pay for itself within a single client project cycle, but I'd need to really dive through the API before making a purchasing decision. Now that the price has been reduced to $250, the barrier for entry is low enough to be more reckless in our evaluation.
But again, what makes it so much better than say NGUI? I just bought it a week ago and I love it, so I'm curious how it stacks up against Scaleform and UniSWF, I'm really not looking to research these things extensively I was just poking around the forums while I drink my coffee and wake up. EDIT: Ok Kyle, that's some of what I was looking for.
New uniSWF.com website launches next week with documents and much more to demonstrate the many unique benefits to using uniSwf. Early release due to demand. Exciting times ahead!
I think NGUI doesent support vectors but flash does so this can scale to anyresultion were others dont.(If NGUI doesent support vectors, if it does then i dont know)
I would rephrase this as "If you don't see why this is worth it, then it's probably not for you." If you already have flash authoring experience and tools, then it's a small price to pay to be able to utilize those in Unity. Vector graphics are another big potential plus, but only if the package makes smart use of it to re-rasterize them at the required resolution to benefit from them.
Just bought this! Pretty excited because I'm pretty much a flash developer transitioning to Unity. We'll see how it goes! UPDATE 1: So far I've experimented with the first tutorial. I've got to say, I'm impressed. I got an animation I made right in Flash imported right into Unity, no problem. It also scales in and out just like vector art in flash, no pixelation you'd get with sprites. That alone is a dream come true, it totally just walked past the whole need for sprite sheets. Quite cool, especially if you are a flash animator. You basically link your movieclips to code (In flash, you can choose an "Export to ActionScript" option, so you can use the class name in code). For UniSWF, however, it just takes those class names as references to import SWF files into the Unity Project. It's pretty cool, as I had an enormous list of animations in Flash, highlighted them all and went into properties, told it to export to Actionscript, re-exported the swf, and went back into Unity. Unity updated the files and imported all of my animations as something similar to a sprite sheet on a texture atlas, but it was already preformatted, and like I said before, it can be scaled in and out as if it's vector art.
I'm interested to know what performance is like. I'm also interested to know what cross-platform development is like - ie: platform-specific UI elements. The concept is great, and if it's up to scratch I'm sure work will snap up a license in no time.
Is it possible to load regular textures and combine them as 'flash like bitmap' with the uniswf components? like a dynamically loaded avatar on a hud?
I have been asking this question and till date no one has given me an answer, how is this uniswf with draw calls?
Hm.. damn shame this is so expensive (but hey, about $50 cheaper than Scaleform though, and with web support to boot...) I also have a UDK installation on my machine and noticed that it includes the entire set of CLIK components available for Scaleform, it appears they work perfectly even running the demo SWF straight from Firefox (a few oddities in the focus system, but this was mainly because there was no game engine context re-binding the tab key event to say up and down arrow) So if it's possible to rebind key events in UniSWF (or even fire the events myself, so for example if Vertical axis is negative fire the tab key event, if positive fire the shift-tab key event), then it appears I can use the Scaleform CLIK components just fine.
Plenty of game industry UI people are already highly fluent in Flash, which provides a toolkit that's designed to do specifically that. Compare the $1000 and integration time against the cost of the additional time required to do the whole thing in Unity. I know guys who've been tasked with writing Flash importers for games in the past to do exactly this, and I bet it cost their company's a lot more than $1000 worth of effort.
The thing is, NGUI is great and I plan on using it for some time to come... but... There are so many little bugs everywhere. They usually take one or two lines to fix, but it's still a hassle. If I'm correct about CLIK working in this plugin, it would definitely be preferable to NGUI (especially since CLIK is designed to be cross-platform for PC/touch/consoles seamlessly whereas NGUI isn't quite as seamless. it's possible, but you still have to do a bit of coding)
What about NGUI isn't seamless? I've been using it a fair bit lately, even doing some fairly advanced things, and everything I've tried so far is seamless. NGUI, however, is a completely different tool to Flash. I wouldn't hand NGUI to one of the graphics guys here and expect them to be able to make a GUI on their own. Flash, on the other hand, I'd expect them to be able to do everything bar hook up the required function calls.
Well, for one the UIButtonKey.... In Scaleform, you can navigate, say, some buttons with the keyboard, a gamepad, or the mouse. When you hover over a button, it becomes highlighted and STAYS highlighted when you move the mouse away, and then you can move to the keyboard keys to move the selection. Not so in NGUI. If you have a control highlighted via UIButtonKeys, and then you move the mouse over another control, they are both highlighted at the same time. This is not the stuff I wanna worry about when making UIs. I want to be able to throw it together and have it just work™
I keep finding these threads asking about UniSWF integration. I think I will post a video walk through working in Flash and compiling it over to Unity for those who want to know the advantages of using this. We built a whole manager system around UniSWF so that we could easily design our pages and bring them seamlessly into Unity to be coded and have up and running in minutes. I believe the latest release had support for importing an AS package to be able to code inside Flash just like Scaleform although I haven't tried it yet. As a designer it takes a heap load of work off development time for positioning things and having intricate HUDs and UIs.
I think, as expensive as UniSWF is, I would seriously consider it if it supported AS3. But AFAIK it doesn't, AS2 only and that to me is a major issue. Sigh. Unity really should have just licensed Scaleform as UDK has. My life would be a lot easier.
I think it does have AS3 I havnt tried it but its more so for timeline commands. You would be surprised how easy it is to manipulate once you have it setup. I would rather do the coding on the Unity side in C# or JS anyways. http://www.uniswf.com/home/manual/sectionName/Timeline%20API::Basic%20uniSWF%20AS3%20API
It seems that their AS3 support is very limited. But... I did do some reading and Googling, and found out that indeed AS2 does support some kind of Components system, where I could, for example, create a set of custom UI Components for my game that I can drag and drop onto the stage and just code in the handlers on the frame. Still I don't think, quite as clean as AS3, but definitely sounds like it should work just fine as a simple bridge from Flash -> Unity Now if only I could get ahold of $150... :'(
I learned AS2 first and haven't touched Flash much –other than for animations– since AS3 came out. I'm just much more familiar with AS2 than AS3. I also don't like to code only on keyframes.
In general AS3 is way better simply because, if you code in AS2, the player will then use the old internal engine which is much much slower than the one that uses AS3. That said, I don't think uniSWF implementes a flash player inside Unity (as Scaleform does with 3D games), so it might not be an issue.